Nielsen dives into online watermarking, content filtering

Nielsen wants to extend its current watermarking technology to DVDs, CDs, and …

Nielsen, the 40,000-employee behemoth that most consumers know as the source of TV ratings, has announced today that it will enter the online market for filtering and watermarking copyrighted content. The announcement was made in concert with watermarking company Digimarc, whose CEO called that deal "a major step forward in realizing our vision of digital watermarking becoming a standard feature of all media content."

Nielsen already has tremendous experience in this market. It currently monitors more than 40 percent of global television viewing and detects the songs playing on more than 1,600 radio stations in North America. More than 95 percent of all national TV programs are already watermarked by the company using a system of encoders at local television stations.

Given its experience in the market, Nielsen already has much of the data it needs to do fingerprinting of audio and video files, and it has licensed Digimarc's patent portfolio to shore up its support for watermarking. Neither company announced terms of the deal, but Digimarc did indicate that it would "significantly contribute to Digimarc's financial performance in 2008 and beyond."

Nielsen hopes to market the Nielsen Digital Media Manager system (apparently, it has no customers yet) especially to Internet sites and services that rely on user-generated content instead of content licensed directly from copyright owners. This could include everything from video-sharing sites like YouTube to social networks such as MySpace to P2P companies that want to filter illicit material.

The goal is to watermark all the major sources of digital content, including television shows, movies, music, and even video games. With so much television content already containing Nielsen watermarks already, the company has enough experience in the business to make a plausible case when it approaches music labels and movie studios about extending the technology to DVDs, CDs, and downloadable content. Fingerprinting will be used as a backup in cases where no watermark is present.

When the system spots a piece of content that violates the preset rules (by including more than two minutes of copyrighted video, for instance, or other preprogrammed rules), it allows companies to block the file from being displayed. In a letter to investors (PDF), Digimarc's CEO noted that content could also be identified so that it would be "automatically re-paired with ads from original distribution channels to extend the campaign's reach or, with new ads, create a new campaign, simplifying the process for enabling consumers to find derivative and related products, services, information, and communities."

Ah, yes: this is about "enabling consumers." Lucky us.

Most watermarking is preferable from a consumer perspective to DRM controls, but dressing it up as a consumer benefit is a bit much.

Nielsen's not the first to launch such a service, of course; the market has been around long enough that Google has already had time to roll its own filtering solution. Still, the presence of a corporation like Nielsen should make the smaller players in the content fingerprinting world nervous, but Nielsen's solution doesn't appear to offer the open standards filtering system that Viacom and others want to see.